I still keep Outlook installed so I can easily go back through all the emails I’ve sent and received since going online (apart from that catastrophic disk failure a few years back but I don’t like to dwell on that).

So, why switch?

Mutt is pretty cool and has lots of advantages, like being able to read mail over ssh and letting me use Vim to write emails, but over the years I’ve grown more and more annoyed by its shortcomings.

It’s attachment handling is pretty crummy (especially if I need to view the attachment on a Windows box when reading email on Linux).

I store my email in maildirs and I’ve yet to find an effective way to search for email in more than one folder at a time.

Using Mutt over ssh is not so convenient when using someone else’s PC, Web-based email programs are much better for that.

Gmail is a very slick app, the labels and search stuff are way beyond anything Mutt can muster.

However, someone as obsessive as I am about email is never going to trust my email to be stored only on someone else’s server.

So all my email gets routed to both Gmail and my home PC.

This gives me a backup if anything goes wrong and also allows me to read emails when offline (which of course never happens).

I keep copies of outgoing emails by BCC’ing myself on emails sent from Gmail (automatic BCC to my home email is number one on my Gmail wish-list).

That last thing I do to ensure I keep copies of all emails is to set my Reply-To address to my home address, so replies go to home (and get copied to Gmail of course).